Part 1: HYMNS
Mothersongs
rock woman rising
8. THE SHE-GODDE
Who is the writer? Let us dispense with that at once, and briefly. Like millions of ordinary middle-aged, middle-class western women : – Advantaged by a small quiet homeland, by kind and formal parents, good brother and sisters, rigorous schooling, higher education, some music, arts, mathematics, science, history, politics; bringing to them no special personal brilliance. Disadvantaged by painful youthful loneliness and self-criticism, spiralling down into severe self-diminishment and unbalance; raised, slowly, by the generosity of thoughtful family, friends, insightful therapy, and spiritual teachers of far and near traditions.
A familiar story of life in our times.
And beyond the good fortune of most – the privilege of having opportunities to act out intense personal dreams – a high school scholarship overseas, diverse tertiary study, a lovely family and children, absorbing profession as a doctor of animals and birds, becoming a private pilot, exploring the earth’s most ancient exposed continent.
Such privilege.
In a world of grinding, dreamless poverty, dispossession, sickness, war, hunger, genocide, and agonising daily loss. Dead children, shot husbands, starved mothers, drug-ruined providers.
Such suffering.
I am a western woman, have shared our comforting bedtime-story : that our society is advancing towards equality and peace and care. And this hologram-illusion remains as hollow as the bellies of sudanese children, as fraudulent as the words of juntas promising peace to their citizens and neighbours, as cynical as the smart face which masks our own western insecurities and iniquities :
choose our governments for their promises of private national gold,
admire the vast treasure-troves of our magnates of greed.
we Western Economic Potentates.
ausminepaddock
THERE IS A GATHERING WAVE, today, of people of many cultures and spiritual traditions and personal life-stories; who are being lifted by a peaking of some king-tide in human history : a surge of truthfulness, of realisation.
Some have committed their private intellectual and spiritual lives to exploring the light that has warmed and softened their worlds. Some may seek, intensely, its source: court mystical experience through invocation and self-dissolution. Others wait, and its visitations come: many of them without plan or preconception.
~ of Woman-Spirit emergent and uprisen:
~ of the Awakening of the sleeping buried Earth-Mother,
Wife of God,
Mother of their Children;
~ And the story of the Resurrection of the She-face of Godde :
the defiant declaration of our female Sanctity
that has always been Ours :
despite centuries – millennia – of ecclesiastical-monarchic condemnation and contempt
for Women as Half-Beings Disqualified by men and their male-god Spirit.
* Cast down, ignored, de-sanctified, de-frocked, despised, disempowered, disenfranchsed, patronised, shrouded, enslaved, in iron or in gilded chains.
* Cast out, vilified, feared, persecuted, stripped, assaulted, blamed, accused, condemned, torched alive.
* Cast as whores, or sirens, or spoilers, or bitches, or nuns, or teases, or nags, or sluts, or chaste maidens, or witches, or moralistic old biddies.
And the very nature of our intelligence, our high Female perception of reality :
– cast as illogical, superficial, second-rate, idle, chatty, vain, irrelevant, unscientific, subjective, peripheral, Emotional ;
– to be occasionally indulged, but not to be seriously heeded ;
– nor given any real influence in the great hierarchies of decision-making that still today decree the quality and events of our whole lives, our children’s lives –
of Goods-Distribution, Law, Community, Philosophy, Religion, Health and Social Services, Wealth accumulation, Warfare, and Killing.
These Institutions of Power that control quality-of-life-and-death
for all human beings and living things –
still overwhelmingly constructed and controlled by relentless Men.
Men – living in some nameless fear and refusal of Women.
Women – living in fear and revulsion at Men’s crude excesses.
*
is accessible to the hearts and spirits of all people :
just as the Stellar presence of Him has been instated before our eyes
in recent times,
and His luminous being discerned by those with eyes to see :
For the decision (in most recent millennia) of all-powerful, fearful men to revere Male spirit only, to de-frock Female to a mere profane and sullen breeding body, has wrested from the Male godhead His inspired communion with Female goddess, and put Her beyond his reach : leaving Him in bereaved sorrow, anger, and enforced celibacy. And She – left in imprisoned deprivation of her consort Male.
No wonder at His reflection in our lives : our towering Man-made tyrannies of ceaseless preparation-for-war, for god-driven crusades and jihad, of oppressive social disapprovals, punitive codes of behaviour, of damning sexual rectitudes and hypocrisies ; and repeated break-outs into violent excess, our world-wide shocking ethnic assaults in His names, the historic Man-bent vision of an ego-centred, even vengeful God, our acts of punishment in the name of male and military honour.
It is in the resurrection of love of Female (of Goddess) ~
and Her reunion with Male (with God) ~
that both the bravery and the tenderness of Spirit, and of human spirit,
is restored :
~ this Wholeness of Godde :
~ In their enactment, in allegory and spirit,
of the most age-old joy of human communion ~
~ the loving convergence of Female and Male
that Conceives another new Life :
the Daughter of Godde
whose Ethic is
Harmlessness.
Our time, the Time of Women, has come:
~ at this Moment in human history:
~ when for the very first time we the Women in many nations are empowered, at last,
to command our own fertility ;
and thereby command also our mental creativity, our full power, and our vocations;
~ and our self-discovery and self-revelation,
to bring forth Who We Are:
Raise it up, and sing it to the world.
Sing it to Men : who can no longer silence us;
and gathering numbers of whom no longer wish to.
The song of Women,
which strikes harmonics deep within all Women and Men :
as together we hear
the Song of the Earth Mother Goddess.
